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The study of how linguistic variation is acquired is considered a nascent field in both psycho- and sociolinguistics. Within that research context, this book aims at two objectives. First, it wants to help bridging the gap between researchers working on acquisition from different theoretical backgrounds. The book therefore includes contributions by both psycho- and sociolinguists, and by representatives of further relevant sub-disciplines of linguistics, including historical linguistics and dialectology. Second, in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison, the book brings together research carried out in different sociolinguistic constellations, as most obviously found in different language areas or different countries.
The volume contains a collection of studies on how the analysis of corpus and psycholinguistic data reveal how linguistic knowledge is affected by the frequency of linguistic elements/stimuli. The studies explore a wide range of phenomena , from phonological reduction processes and palatalization to morphological productivity, diachronic change, adjective preposition constructions, auxiliary omission, and multi-word units. The languages studied are Spanish and artificial languages, Russian, Dutch, and English. The sister volume focuses on language representation.
Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfi...
Much theorizing in language change research is made without taking into account dialect data. Yet, dialects seem to be superior data to build a theory of linguistic change on, since dialects are relatively free of standardization and therefore more tolerant of variant competition in grammar. In addition, as compared to most cross-linguistic and diachronic data, dialect data are unusually high in resolution. This book shows that the study of dialect variation has indeed the potential, perhaps even the duty, to play a central role in the process of finding answers to fundamental questions of theoretical historical linguistics. It includes contributions which relate a clearly formulated theoretical question of historical linguistic interest with a well-defined, solid empirical base. The volume discusses phenomena from different domains of grammar (phonology, morphology and syntax) and a wide variety of languages and language varieties in the light of several current theoretical frameworks.
This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating t...
This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.
This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and ...
This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. It identifies typical developments found repeatedly in the histories of different languages and explores their origins, as well as investigating the factors that determine whether change proceeds rapidly, slowly, or not at all.
This volume is a collection of grammar sketches from several Italo-Romance varieties. The contributions cover various areas of linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax) and are organized in sections according to the customary geolinguistic classification. Each chapter provides the description of a salient phenomenon for a given language, based on novel data, as well as the state-of-the-art knowledge on that phenomenon. The articles are in-depth studies carried out by prominent experts as well as promising young scholars. The theoretical apparatus is kept to a minimum in order to make the book accessible to scholars without specific expertise. For the same reason, hypotheses and formalisms are introduced gradually, only if necessary for the description of the data.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the syntactic variation of the dialects of Spanish. More precisely, it covers Spanish theoretical syntax that takes as its data source non-standard grammatical phenomena. Approaching the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects opens a door not only to the intricacies of the language, but also to a set of challenges of linguistic theory itself, including language variation, language contact, bilingualism, and diglossia. The volume is divided into two main sections, the first focusing on Iberian Spanish and the second on Latin American Spanish. Chapters cover a wide range of syntactic constructions and phenomena, such as clitics, agreement, subordination, differential object marking, expletives, predication, doubling, word order, and subjects. This volume constitutes a milestone in the study of syntactic variation, setting the stage for future work not only in vernacular Spanish, but all languages.